


swallow what they think

by kaori



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Child Abuse - Negligence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 11:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaori/pseuds/kaori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Orphans always make the best recruits,” M had said. Q is one such orphan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	swallow what they think

It's his father crashing to the ground after tripping through the entrance of the house, swearing crass and loud, that rouses him from his sleep. He slips free of his blankets, thick socks cushioning his tiny feet on the floorboards, and makes his way out of his bedroom to see his father struggling to get back up to his feet, reeking strongly of a stench that has him wrinkling his noise.  
  
His father looks like an absolute wreck in the dim patio light: tie a hanging noose around his neck, the top three buttons of his shirt undone and hair a wild, frenzied mess. He looks like he might've been crying, but there's no signs of tears tracked down his face; there's only dark, red veins crawling through the sclera of his eyes.  
  
He steps closer to his father, shivers at the wind that buffets through the open door, and stops when the man whips his head up so quickly in the direction of the squeaking floorboard.  
  
His father usually watches him with a strange expression on his face; like he doesn't know what to do with him, like he doesn't understand him at all. This time there's something else in his father's eyes, one he is unused to outside of the moving pictures in the television screen. It's a little something like fear.  
  
"There's something _wrong_ with you," his father tells him. There's a slur in the way he speaks, an undercurrent of anger, but that does nothing to lessen the clarity of his words.  
  
His chest feels tighter, and he wants to reach up a hand to press down on it until the feeling goes away. He doesn't, because he's too annoyed that he doesn't understand what it is, what it means. So he pushes the feeling away.  
  
He turns his back on his father and goes back to his room. 

ø

There's a computer in the study, big and beige and bulky. He's watched his father use it many times before, peaking through the gap in the doorway as the clickity-clack of buckling keycaps slivered through. It's a room not yet explored; because the handle is too high for him to reach, because it's the only room his father keeps shut.  
  
He's three, his father's gone off to work and the door's been left ajar. Curiosity has him crossing the carpeted floor and climbing onto the wooden, cushion-backed chair. It's the first time he sees a keyboard.  
  
He already knows his numbers, those are familiar. He knows his alphabet too, but the first letter he sees on the keys is not the first letter he's been taught. It's rounded and dissected with a tiny line. It looks infinitely better than the A beneath. 

ø

Every morning he wakes up to the sound of rushing water from the bathroom down the hall. He watches the hands of the analogue clock on the bedside table. When the longest reaches the bolded **3** there's a knock on his door. His father tells him there's cereal and fresh milk in the fridge if he's hungry, tells him to study hard, tells him not to leave the house, tells him to use the phone like he's been shown if there's an emergency (he's never been told what constitutes as an emergency, though). His father then retreats, leaves the house with the sounds of the television a constant drone of noise in the background.  
  
He sits up in bed when the longest hand reaches **6** and looks to the little shelf of books in his room. There's a lot of them, but he's read them all at least ten times already.  
  
He knows his father has a similar shelf in the living room, with books that are larger and much wider. He'll read one of those today. 

ø

"What's my name?" This is the first question he asks his father.  
  
The man starts so violently he knocks the pot off the kitchen stove. It crashes to the floor with a jarring clatter, the steaming broth messy and seeping red into the tiles. His father's staring at him, eyes are wide and mouth agape. It doesn't look like he's up for speaking anytime soon.  
  
So he says, "If I don't have a name, can I be Q?"  
  
There's something in his father's eyes, in the tilt of his furrowing brows and deep middle crease between. Q doesn't know what that means, but his father's silences have always been as good as acceptance. 

ø

The first book Q reads from his father's library is a book written by Steven Levy, titled _Hacker_.  
  
It renews his interest in the computer in his father's study, and he spends days in the black screens of the DOS. 

ø

There's not much to like about school. Q doesn't like the way the teacher speaks to him, voice high and cooing like he's a dog. He doesn't like the writing exercises, because he doesn't see why he has to make his scratchy handwriting neater when the computer can do it for him. He likes capital letters though, so he'll write those—once only, because he doesn't see the point in writing them out a hundred times more. He already knows how to count and add and multiply, how to tell the time, how to read; everything is painfully easy.  
  
Q doesn't go outside to play during lunch, like everyone else. He prefers staying inside with the building blocks that are always hogged during playtime. Sometimes he plays with the playdough, sometimes with the paints. He likes colours and blank canvases. (They're never _wrong_.)  
  
Once, the teacher pulls him aside and asks him why he doesn't talk to the other children. He tells her that they are stupid and noisy, and he's forced to stand in a corner for fifteen minutes to think about what he's just done wrong. (He doesn't know what it is, though, so he rests his head against the wall and cycles through what he's read about C++.) 

ø

Two years later, his current teacher calls his father.  
  
He sits outside the classroom as the teacher speaks in quiet hushes. He hears them anyway.  
  
"He's very intelligent for his age," she begins, and proceeds to discuss how he doesn't do the things that he thinks are too easy. How at first she'd thought he was being uncooperative on purpose, how now she really believes he may be a very gifted child.  
  
"I'm worried about your son," she continues. Apparently he doesn't smile or laugh when he should, he doesn't ask for help, doesn't even ask questions even when she thinks he might want to. She's seen some of the other children pick on him because he's too quiet, because he doesn't play with them, because he never gets angry or upset. He doesn't speak to them, and only responds when the teacher asks him for an answer to a particularly complex math question, or to spell a tricky word. He doesn't speak enough. It's not healthy for a boy his age. It'd be unhealthier though, to put him in the accelerated program if he doesn't know how to interact with people.  
  
She thinks his father should take him to a doctor, because something might be _wrong with him_.  
  
His father never takes him to that doctor. 

ø

Q decides to watch people.  
  
Sometimes he goes to the park, sitting on the bench with a CD player in his lap, and simply watches. Sometimes he goes to the underground, but too many times strangers have approached him to ask where his mummy is, so he learns to stick to watching people on TV, to reading books and newspapers and anything he can find about feelings and emotions and being _normal_.  
  
(He much prefers learning Basic or COBOL or Pascal, but they don't stop the disconcerted looks his father his teachers his peers send his way.)  
  
Slowly, Q learns when it's appropriate to smile and laugh, to frown and cry. He speaks a bit more when spoken to, and if he's a little awkward no one so much as blinks an eye.  
  
It's easy to pretend. 

ø

After his father loses his job, the man spends his days drinking himself into an alcoholic stupor.  
  
In spite of that, there's still money streaming in. It's illegal to break into computer systems, Q knows, but he's not too concerned; he's still a minor, after all.  
  
Q cleans up the mess of empty, discarded beer bottles and gives his father one that's full and cold. His father's too drunk these days to notice anything. 

ø

Q is twelve when his father dies. It's a dreary morning, as always, when Q finds him passed out against the door of the open fridge, a bottle half-full of beer clutched in his spindly-white hands.  
  
At first Q thinks he's sleeping, until he fails to register the rise and fall of his father's chest.  
  
Q watches the man for a long moment, just to be certain that he's no longer breathing. When thirty minutes have come and gone, Q takes tentative steps to the phone hanging on the wall. 

ø

Sometimes, Q stares at the picture of his mother and imagines what he would feel if he could've met her; it could be missing, could be longing, (could be nothing,) he doesn't know.  
  
Finish high school, graduate university, get a decent job: this is what he thinks she would tell him if she were still alive. (This is what all mothers tell their sons in books, in television shows, in movies.)  
  
That is what he does, all by the age of seventeen. 

ø

"Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled."  
  
Bond finally glances over at him. He's unshaven and haggard, but his eyes are clear and sharp, startlingly blue.  
  
"Or _not_ pulled; it's hard to know which in your pyjamas." It's the way he emphasises his words that catches Q off guard, because it's _knowing_ in the way no one else has been able to notice ever since he'd learnt better.  
  
There's a faint a smile quirking at the edge of Bond's lips with not a single lick of fear. "Q." Bond offers a hand.  
  
Something almost like a genuine smile tugs up the corners of Q's lips. "007."  
  
He accepts the handshake, strong and firm, and it feels like he's finally waking up, that grip of excitement inside his chest squeezing and easing all at once as blood pulses faster through his veins.  
  
Q looks away, finding distraction in pulling out an envelope.  
  
He doesn't miss the way Bond huffs silently with laughter in the corner of his eye. 


End file.
